Thursday Thought: Look all around you

A current pleasure of mine after getting home while the sun is still pleasant is to take my (currently) nine eighteen month 5 year old for a stroll in her pram. It's been a while since I drafted this, time to tidy up the backlog...

We were lucky enough to live opposite some bushland, big enough where you can do a 30 minute loop and enjoy a mostly native tree/scrub area. There are obvious trails that are no problem for a pram, but still give plenty of bumps for the young one to practice her vocals.

Through the right combination of events - since coincidence has such amazing potential, I decided to walk down a dead end trail I rarely walk through and enjoyed it so much I had to share.

We recently had some short but hard rain - a nearby corridor of suburbia experienced some freakish hail. This made the ground a little firmer, and soon after some maintenance vehicles travelled this particular trail. That left it ripe to preserve footprints in such a way that I'm sure left a tale that I'm far from being able to fully interpret.

It made me think back to our ancestors and their reliance on the ability to interpret such information in a way to live longer. To know how long since predators passed by, and how long ago; follow prey in the right direction; recognise footsteps from strangers.

All I could do was recognise big dogs, small dogs, kangaroos - though it's been a while since I've seen them. I saw smaller prints that could be rabbits, cats, or both. A few bike tracks, human shoe prints over the tyre tracks - all in a variety of orders.

The dog tracks were erratic, kangaroos had an obvious direction - and where very far apart! I also considered what I couldn't see - any snake trails. I know plenty of other reptiles live in there, there's no reason to think I couldn't find any dugites or maybe even tiger snakes if I know where to look.

Earlier today as I left work the first thing I saw in the sky was a contrail that split the sky. The tropospheric winds must have been relatively still because the start of the trail was still quite defined. I enjoyed a little giggle at the chemtrail conspiracy theorists that think it must be poisoning day - they don't happen very often in Perth thanks to local conditions.

As I arrived home the perspective had changed, and by the time I was on my walk the vapour dissipated into such an amazing pattern, covering the setting sun.

I thought it best to try describe the nature I enjoyed this afternoon rather than post a few cool pictures. Partially because I thought my writing skills might benefit, and more profoundly - I think contemporary society needs to remember to take time out from technology and let the brain do it's work behind the scenes. Process the information of the day, enjoy the current surroundings, think about the most bizarre succession of thoughts that take you some place far from the present - or one of the favourite things I heard a former martial arts teacher say: find your thoughts, then lose them.

If you enjoy occasional ramblings like this that might provoke a few related thoughts in your own noggin, you might also enjoy Steven Feuerstein's personal blog -> feuerthoughts.blogspot.com, though he seems to have another major project on the go since I drafted this post.
You can also try using the Thursday Thought, Science and/or the Friday Fun labels on my blog.

Change label dynamically in Oracle APEX

I was developing with Oracle Forms for an awesome project when I first heard about Twitter, and it was described to me by Jeff as a 'micro-blogging' site.

I think I did what could be my smallest blog post, as a tweet. A micro-blog, if you will.

Change floating label dynamically #orclAPEX
$("label[for='P1_NOTE']").text('Happy Friday!'); pic.twitter.com/rwNd9scY04

— Scott Wesley 🌌 (@swesley_perth) September 20, 2019

Here is the snippet that dynamically updates a label, in this case, a floating label.
$("label[for='P1_NOTE']").text('Happy Friday!');

Which could also be written as
$("#P1_NOTE_LABEL").text('Happy Friday!');

This could be executed within a dynamic action, as a result of a change to some field on your page, perhaps to help instruct the user.

Happy APEXing!

APEX 19.x Dark Mode CSS Extension

There have already been some insightful posts about APEX 19.2 Early Adopter, plus an interesting feed of features on Twitter, as they're discovered.

Sven has a great summary.
Adrian comments on markdown.
Mike is really plugging faceted search on twitter. I particularly look forward to playing with that one.

I couldn't resist giving the dark mode a test spin.

I immediately experienced the same contrasting issues from the original clean skin that 5.0 gave us, plus a few minor adjustments.

Spot the difference

Tweaks so far include

• Region header
• Delta icon
• Text field background
• Scrollbar width
• Save message location (not seen)

I'm still trying to decide what the best contrast is to break through the darkness on the vertical scroll, but it's a good start.

As Mike Hichwa suggested, the experts may give this a twirl in 20.1.

You can find the CSS I use in this Github respository, but switching between the two modes will require manual interaction with the style extender, since there are no dark-mode classes to utilise.
https://github.com/swesley/orclapex-builder-css

I'm trying to lift my game a little, get more organised, and improve my markdown game.

Edit: Since I'm currently doing most of my work in 18.1, I forgot 19.1 introduced dark mode, not 19.2.

That said, I think Vita - Dark style added to the 19.2 Universal Theme offers better contrast than the page builder itself.

19.2 Dark UT style

Why do the users get the good stuff? ;p

Paste from clipboard in Oracle APEX

Since APEX makes it so nifty, I've got a few pages simply used as query tools - handy to verify data during development.

I also use these pages to experiment with UX, and recently I thought I could save myself pressing ctrl+v to paste my ID into a field for lookup.

I knew we had done something recently for adding content to the clipboard, so I figured there would be a way to paste clipboard content into a field.

Sure enough, Dr Google had the answers, though it's bleeding edge. Good enough to experiment with.

For me, adapting this response to APEX meant setting the provided field name.

I added this to my JS global declaration.

async function paste(input) {
  const text = await navigator.clipboard.readText();

  $s(input, text);
}

And this when I clicked the button to action the paste, I nominate the item I want the clipboard data to be copied into.
paste('P105_EVENT_ID');

An on-change dynamic action on this field would add a member to the collection, and refresh a number of regions that query the collection.

Don't forget to add Page Items to Submit

I have an example here.
https://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=32532:22

I thought I noticed a potential odd behaviour with this, possibly due to the async action.
Therefore I've created an example with a few regions, and I'll try throttling the connection to see if that highlights the behaviour.

And so now I have this as a handy reference, I'll demonstrate some APEX collections and regular expression behaviour while I'm at it.